djatoka and JPEG 2000

I've been so busy lately, that I'm only getting to reading the most recent issue of D-Lib Magazine. It contains an article, co-authored by Herbert Van de Sompel, on djatoka, an open source JPEG 2000 server. It stands out as an open source development effort, with its initial application to cultural heritage projects.

In my institution's projects, we employed LizardTech's proprietary MrSID format (referenced in the article) for high resolution imaging, including online manipulation. The Early Washington Maps collection, which was co-built by the University of Washington and Washington State University Libraries, employs MrSID for its online maps. At a high level, the use of this format hasn't been that viable. The image server that enables online manipulation of the maps without a download, is a Perl program that was released by LizardTech, but not updated over time. (For an example, see this image, and use the Java viewer for manipulation. Note the image size, 100 MB, which illustrates the problem that the authors are trying to tackle, as they discuss in section 2.) LizardTech seemed to have problems finding the right balance between encoding and server software sales (including its bundling of Dj Vu document format support with its servers); the company is still is business, but as a proprietary format, the advantages of JPEG 2000, an open ISO standard, are obvious.

My institution has begun the migration to JPEG 2000 imaging using the popular OCLC/DiMeMa CONTENTdm server software. CONTENTdm supports JPEG 2000 in both its encoding and server software. The strengths of JPEG 2000 are listed in section 3.1 of the article. As the authors (Ryan Chute and van de Sompel) note, djatoka was developed to provide an open source alternative for JPEG 2000 use, one that supports content reuse.

It would have been useful to add the attribute of ease of use, given that the projects supported are in cultural heritage institutions. I think of the UIUC Archon software (designed to serve finding aid content on the web)...it isn't as easy to set up as perhaps depicted, but ease of use was an important goal for the Archon server software. djatoka currently doesn't run on a Windows server OS, a definite minus, particulary given the tool's possible use with humanities projects.

The reuse concept is very instructive. To quote from the article, "off-the-shelf tools typically don't go beyond offering the ability to embed an entire image in a remote page, either as a stand-alone image or as an embedded object (e.g., an applet)." The authors cite products which do build that support, and how djatoka supports URLs that define specific regions of images. In summary, this piece of the discussion combines the digital collections and imaging concepts with Web 2.0 reuse, and should drive user expectations going forward for image compression/decompression products and tools.